What's the most petty/pointless/pedantic hill you're willing to die on?

NotNotMike@programming.dev to Ask Lemmy@lemmy.world – 456 points –

For me, it may be that the toilet paper roll needs to have the open end away from the wall. I don't want to reach under the roll to take a piece! That's ludicrous!

That or my recent addiction to correcting people when they use "less" when they should use "fewer"

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I have given up on "steep learning curve". A learning curve is proficiency on the Y axis against time on the X. A steep learning curve indicates something that is learned very quickly. A shallow learning curve is something that takes a long time to master. See Ebbinghaus 1885.

I always view that one as meaning that you must learn a lot about something in a short amount of time in order to use it effectively, where shallow learning curve, in a positive context, would mean you can make it useful without knowing all that much about its full capabilities.

That's my take too. Short for "this requires you to follow a steep learning curve, even if it is not easy to do so."

Whatever that is, it's not a learning curve. Ebbinghaus defined it in his classic work.

It's learning over time, with proficiency being the area under the line. It's describing having to learn a lot to achieve the same proficiency compared to something with a shallow learning curve.

Ebbinghaus didn't integrate areas under the acquisition curve. He wasn't a mathematical psychologist.

All these replies talking about graphs and I'm here imagining for years having to pedal up a steep hill requiring lots of effort like a pleb.

That's where the confusion comes from, conflating the experience of walking up a steep hill vs an acquisition curve.